Towards the end of June Chris Gransden, who has ported a number of emulators and games to RISC OS, released an alpha version of a new application for viewing images on the platform, explaining that “There are quite a few variants of various existing image formats and more recent formats that cannot be viewed easily on RISC OS.”

His application, ImageView[zip], should provides a means to access more of these formats, thereby giving us improved compatibility with the rest of the world.

It is actually “a simple front-end to the ImageMagick libraries” which, on other platforms, are the core of “a software suite designed to create, edit, compose or convert bitmap images” and ImageView accesses these libraries via the MagickWand C API – just one of a number of interfaces for accessing the libraries, depending which language is being used.

ImageView should therefore support reading all the formats that the libraries themselves support reading, other than those that need an external converter, and it can also export in a number of formats, as well as create a preview image of any Truetype, OpenType or Postscript Type 1 fonts.

Chris has also made available two related applications, which he didn’t include as part of ImageView (had he done so, the zip file above, which weighs in at over 6MB, would have been double the size. These applications are RawView[Zip] for viewing RAW images, mainly produced by digital cameras, and GhostView[Zip] for displaying PDF/PostScript files. The functionality for these is not complete, Chris says, but hopefully they will be useful.